Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Various
Date this lecture was recorded: April 8, 2017
In this last episode of stories from the Blue Dot tour, you get to hear stories from the barn at my parents’ place in Lancaster, PA. Tales from Tipper and friends as well as a contest to see if you can find my story in the back catalog… . I hope you enjoy this last round of stories. —Lex Pelger
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:23 ►
2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:34 ►
And I want to begin by thanking Dennis T. for his direct donation to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with these programs.
00:00:45 ►
And I also would like to welcome my new supporters on Patreon, and these good souls are Eugene R., Sean B., and Drew B., and I thank you one and all.
00:00:52 ►
Well, today we’re going to get to listen to the last of the psychedelic stories that Lex Pelger collected last year as he drove across country on his Blue Dot Tour.
00:00:56 ►
In all, I think there were around 22 different cities in which Lex collected these stories,
00:01:01 ►
and I’m pleased that we were able to listen to them here in the salon.
00:01:04 ►
collected these stories, and I’m pleased that we were able to listen to them here in the salon.
00:01:10 ►
I even got to attend one of these events live myself when he came to San Diego,
00:01:15 ►
and I hope that more of these kind of events will take place as we continue to move through time,
00:01:20 ►
and if so, I also hope that we get to listen to them here in the salon.
00:01:26 ►
While it’s always good to hear from the elders, both young and old, I think that it’s also important that we get to hear from our friends and peers about their involvement in
00:01:31 ►
the worldwide psychedelic community. I’ve discovered that their stories never cease
00:01:37 ►
to amaze me either. In fact, just the other night in my weekly Zoom conversation with my Patreon
00:01:43 ►
supporters, one of our fellow salonners
00:01:46 ►
from russia joined us and just as a little aside here from the quality of his audio and video my
00:01:52 ►
guess is that well he’s probably even got a better internet connection than i do anyway nikita
00:01:58 ►
entertained us with a couple of his stories and well i have to admit, by being really intrigued by them. So far, in addition
00:02:06 ►
to fellow slaughters from all around the states, we’ve had people join us from London, the Netherlands,
00:02:12 ►
Germany, Russia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Australia, and a couple other countries that I’m forgetting
00:02:18 ►
right now. My point is that interest in psychedelics is in no way limited to just the United States.
00:02:26 ►
This is a global community, and we are really pleased that you are a part of it as well.
00:02:31 ►
So, thanks for being here.
00:02:34 ►
Now I’m going to turn the microphone over to Lex Pelger,
00:02:37 ►
who has just returned from a whirlwind global excursion of his own.
00:02:42 ►
But, nonetheless, he was able to put today’s program together for us.
00:02:46 ►
And for that, and on behalf of the entire salon, I would like to thank Lex for his dedication and
00:02:53 ►
hard work in expanding the range of programs that we get to listen to here on the salon.
00:02:58 ►
So without any further ado, here’s Lex.
00:03:01 ►
Further ado, here’s Lex.
00:03:10 ►
I’m Lex Pelger, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:03:17 ►
Today is a very poignant episode for me for a few different reasons.
00:03:22 ►
Not only are these the very last stories from the Blue Dot Tour,
00:03:26 ►
the first ones that you’ll hear were recorded in my parents’ barn in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
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You can hear the enthusiasm of the audience
00:03:31 ►
who don’t often get to have these events
00:03:33 ►
out in farm country.
00:03:34 ►
And you’ll even get to hear
00:03:35 ►
some great stories from my dad.
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One reason that’s special for me
00:03:39 ►
to hear this recording from 16 months ago
00:03:42 ►
is that Claire and I returned there just last week
00:03:45 ►
for the wedding celebration
00:03:47 ►
where we became husband and wife.
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Our godmother officiated the ceremony
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at a little stone church
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just down the road from my parents’ house.
00:03:56 ►
Then everybody came back to the same barn to celebrate.
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I also got to introduce my baby Sophia to the donkeys
00:04:02 ►
and take her swimming the pond where I grew up.
00:04:06 ►
It was a magical weekend and it brought everything full circle. The Blue Dot Tour led me to having a
00:04:12 ►
baby, getting married, and coming back home to my roots. I’ll miss the Blue Dot Tour. It was one of
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the best things that ever happened to me and I might not be able to repeat it again soon as I
00:04:23 ►
settle down to fatherhood.
00:04:25 ►
But I do dream that someday I’ll be back on the road with my babies, collecting stories,
00:04:31 ►
hosting events, and bringing people together. Thanks to everyone who made the tour possible.
00:04:36 ►
Thanks to my partners at Symposia who worked so hard. Thanks to all the hosts who helped us find
00:04:41 ►
venues and gave us a roof over our heads and filled the trip with fellowship.
00:04:46 ►
Thanks to Lorenzo for giving a platform to share these stories.
00:04:50 ►
And thanks to all of you for listening.
00:04:53 ►
On that note, I’ll end these Blue Dot sessions with a little contest.
00:04:57 ►
At one of these stops on the tour, I broke down and finally told a story of my own.
00:05:03 ►
So if you’ve been listening carefully, you might have already identified my voice.
00:05:08 ►
So for the next two weeks, until I release the next episode of The Salon 2.0,
00:05:13 ►
if you shoot me an email identifying the city where I shared a story,
00:05:17 ►
three of those people will receive a free hard copy of one of my cannabis graphic novels.
00:05:23 ►
As always, you can reach me at pelger at gmail dot com. Thank you. from out there on the road. All right, cool.
00:05:45 ►
Thank you everybody for coming,
00:05:47 ►
checking out Symposia Stories.
00:05:50 ►
This isn’t just drug storytelling.
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This isn’t just psychedelic storytelling,
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though it tends to be the easiest way
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for people to acquire stories
00:05:58 ►
that are really important to them.
00:06:00 ►
But any drug makes sense.
00:06:02 ►
It can be opiates.
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It can be ketamine.
00:06:04 ►
It can be the pharmaceuticals. It can be ketamine. It can be the pharmaceuticals.
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It can be the painkillers you had to take because of severe disease. Anything that you think was
00:06:10 ►
really important to you, we want to hear about. You know, it’s not a place for bragging. It’s a
00:06:15 ►
place for sharing stuff that matters to you. And there are lots of drugs in your head.
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There are all kinds of psychoactive experiences you can have from giving birth,
00:06:29 ►
from losing somebody very close to you, from a car accident, from jumping out of an airplane.
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You know, if you really feel the call to tell a story tonight, please do. That’s what this is here for. And the more nervous you are about telling the story, the better it is that it
00:06:38 ►
will probably go. That’s what we tend to see the most of. So, and you’re never going to get a more
00:06:43 ►
welcoming crowd than this. They’re slightly
00:06:46 ►
drunk. They’re slightly smoked up.
00:06:48 ►
These are people that are going to be on your
00:06:49 ►
side. So that’s always
00:06:51 ►
nice. And maybe we can
00:06:53 ►
kill the lights on the inside a little bit, Dad?
00:06:55 ►
It’s kind of good to have it here.
00:06:58 ►
And to everyone out there, did you start the
00:06:59 ►
Facebook Live? Alright, hello to everyone
00:07:01 ►
out there in the world. This is my parents’ barn.
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This is a stop I’m most excited for on the Blue Dot Tour. And so thanks for joining us.
00:07:10 ►
And now we, I believe, are ready to start the storytelling. Please find me in the back if you
00:07:14 ►
want to get on the list for who we have coming up next. Hello, everybody. I am an ER and trauma nurse, and I participated in one of the Hopkins psilocybin
00:07:33 ►
studies in which they were looking at the effects of psychedelics on mood and behavior in healthy
00:07:38 ►
people. So this wasn’t a study that was intended for a therapeutic effect like the ones you saw
00:07:43 ►
in the film earlier, more just give me a high dose of something and see what happens so i figured i would share one
00:07:50 ►
of my experiences from one of my five dose sessions um give you an idea of dosage uh the
00:07:58 ►
highest dose i received was a 30 milligram per 70 kilogram dose for my body weight works out to be between like
00:08:05 ►
four and four and a quarter grams of like dried mushroom material.
00:08:09 ►
So I’ll share with you one of my session reports that I wrote when I got home
00:08:18 ►
that night and hope you get something from it. At first I had had faint, closed-eye visuals of geometric patterns and lines
00:08:27 ►
and the familiar flush on my chest and racing heart.
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I remember transitioning to silly Halloween-decoration-type visuals
00:08:34 ►
and thinking that perhaps there was something darker under the cartoonish jack-o’-lantern and ghost faces.
00:08:40 ►
I dove in deeper and saw some kaleidoscopic demonic faces, all teeth and snarls, but that didn’t scare me
00:08:46 ►
It felt contrived, like I’d seen it in a movie
00:08:49 ►
and was definitely creating it on my own
00:08:51 ►
The red faces turned to autumn leaves
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and at some point shortly thereafter I became one with what I was experiencing
00:08:57 ►
I felt my inner world expanding beyond what my mind could comprehend
00:09:01 ►
Cavernous isn’t the right word for a space without limits
00:09:04 ►
but it’s the closest thing I have There were millions of ringing golden gongs beyond what my mind can comprehend. Cavernous isn’t the right word for a space without limits,
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but it’s the closest thing I have.
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There were millions of ringing golden gongs echoing in the vastness of my consciousness,
00:09:12 ►
and I was stunned and terrified and exhilarated at the idea
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that this was inside of little old me,
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and that the idea had me looking for where me went,
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and I felt like my mind was going to break
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trying to reconcile the TARDIS paradox I was living in.
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I saw an older woman with gray in her hair
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that I knew to be the crone.
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She scared me, and I felt power in her,
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and a gust of wind blew the autumn leaves
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and her hair swirled away into nothingness and death.
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Then I was seeing the triple goddess in her full form,
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an endless curving wall of open mouths
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wailing her crone song of grief and ending, golden and orange and still somehow the old woman,
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lamenting the approach of death. Under and through her was the maiden, soft, sweet melodies,
00:09:56 ►
beautiful young bodies in linen so fine it was like spiderweb, promising new life and sex and
00:10:01 ►
shoots of green in the spring. Through the warm, full altho of the mother,
00:10:07 ►
wise and loving and reassuring,
00:10:09 ►
wide-mouthed and full-hipped and with a knowing chuckle just beneath her song,
00:10:13 ►
I felt in that moment that I was experiencing a true manifestation of the divine feminine
00:10:17 ►
and felt her moving through and all around me.
00:10:21 ►
I had a sudden moment of reclaiming myself, my identity as Marlena,
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the woman approaching her 30th year, and knew that I need to find a way to gracefully say goodbye to the maiden time of my
00:10:30 ►
life stream. I wondered how I am to manifest the mother in a life devoid of children, how to be
00:10:36 ►
the mistress of my heart and embody the warm, welcoming safety and love that she represents.
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I also knew, paradoxically, that I would always be all three, just as she is all
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performs at once, and I saw my own cronehood waiting for me and my death just beyond that.
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There was a moment of grief from my youth, mingled with anticipation of what lessons await me in the
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rest of my years. Then I lost myself again as I met the masculine aspect shown as the wild man
00:11:02 ►
or horned god. I saw him deep in the woods,
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fierce and ageless and terrifying, bow in hand full of the madness of the wilderness.
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I saw him hunting, and I knew by the antlers on his head that he was both the hunter and the prey,
00:11:15 ►
and that he was hunting himself. And I thought that perhaps this is where the pain of being a
00:11:19 ►
man comes from. I gave voice to the thought of, of course this is physically uncomfortable.
00:11:27 ►
You can’t have your mind ripped open and be shown the divine without some discomfort
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I felt like the sacredness and power of what I was
00:11:31 ►
witnessing was too much for my brain
00:11:33 ►
like trying to fathom the awesomeness of it
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was going to fracture my thin grasp on reality
00:11:37 ►
and then I was in a cave, dimly lit
00:11:41 ►
and glistening with condensation
00:11:42 ►
beautiful rock formations, stalactites and
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stalagmites dripping with fluorescent drops of water, denying gravity and dripping from
00:11:49 ►
floor to ceiling and back again. I was enveloped in an awesome sense of peace and tranquility
00:11:54 ►
and love, and a feeling of sacredness and universal compassion. And I heard a voice
00:11:59 ►
that was wholly other from me say, this is a place of rest, and you can return whenever you need to.
00:12:08 ►
So that was maybe half an hour out of five eight-hour dose sessions.
00:12:19 ►
Ultimately, I kind of came away from this whole experience that started in August of this past year and ended in December
00:12:25 ►
with a couple of little lessons
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that I sort of distilled from the whole madness.
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One, you are stronger and less broken than you think.
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Two, if you sit with the dissonance and the discomfort,
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it will eventually transform into a clear, cohesive note
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and an eloquent cry from the soul will emerge, reaching out to know God.
00:12:49 ►
The discomfort spurs growth.
00:12:50 ►
You must be willing to be uncomfortable in order to break through.
00:12:54 ►
The key is finding a safe place in which to endure that discomfort,
00:12:57 ►
and a place where you are protected from predators,
00:12:59 ►
from those who might take advantage of your vulnerability.
00:13:02 ►
Once you find that place, the work of tearing down your fortifications must begin. You can’t keep your full armor on. I expect to feel the winds of
00:13:09 ►
change move across your skin. Three, the world is not a safe place for a woman to walk about
00:13:14 ►
naked in, so armor is reasonably necessary. But while you are in the safe space, you can
00:13:19 ►
re-engineer your armor with a quick-release toggle so that you can shed it fully when the opportunity arrives.
00:13:31 ►
Four, love is never something to be regretted, even when it is transient, unrequited, or unreasonable.
00:13:32 ►
Never be ashamed of your open heart.
00:13:36 ►
And five, relinquishing control is a healthy practice.
00:13:37 ►
Thank you. You can see why I love these stories.
00:13:47 ►
They have beautiful lessons.
00:13:49 ►
Thank you so much.
00:13:52 ►
All right.
00:13:53 ►
And the second person that we have scheduled
00:13:55 ►
is hiding.
00:13:59 ►
If I can’t get him to go up,
00:14:00 ►
maybe we can break the seal with someone else I know
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who has a good story or two.
00:14:06 ►
My father, Ned Pelger.
00:14:21 ►
Well, O-U-W. You just said that because you’re always behind me going up the hills. So I didn’t do a lot of psychedelics when I was young,
00:14:29 ►
but I did some. And I particularly remember one time, my father just passed not too long
00:14:35 ►
ago, my mom did three years ago, and I’m very fortunate to be close with him and have a
00:14:41 ►
lot of time with him. And I remember one time in high school, I had taken some psilocybin mushrooms
00:14:48 ►
and was kind of waiting for them to kick in, and they kind of kicked in.
00:14:52 ►
And I was at home, and we loved practical jokes at our house.
00:14:56 ►
We were just, and I went to put my boots on, and it was like, what the world?
00:15:01 ►
I could feel like whipped cream or something, something in the boot.
00:15:04 ►
And I said, like, what’s this? And then as I, I like went in, I realized that there was a dead mouse in there.
00:15:10 ►
And so my mom, so I like tear my boot off, grab this mouse by the tail and go running, you know,
00:15:19 ►
in through the house. Who put a mouse in my food? My mom starts laughing hysterically and starts to run.
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I’m following her.
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The last thing you want to do is run from a
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teenage boy or a dog.
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There’s not a lot of difference.
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I am following her
00:15:36 ►
and she’s screaming and she
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turns and stops and I
00:15:39 ►
throw the mouse in her direction.
00:15:42 ►
Of course, I’m at this point
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fairly engaged in her direction. And of course, I’m at this point, you know, fairly engaged in the experience.
00:15:47 ►
And as luck would have it,
00:15:49 ►
it hits her chest and drops down
00:15:51 ►
and catches in her bra.
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Now, the last thing you want to see
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when you’re kind of in that state
00:15:58 ►
is your mom rip open her bra.
00:16:00 ►
And like, oh, oh, get it, get it.
00:16:03 ►
No, no.
00:16:14 ►
house. And I’m like, oh, oh, get it, get it. No, no. So that was one experience. Another one, I love to walk in the woods. Most days I walk in the woods and just pray and think and just be. And a couple, I think it was a winter ago, I was walking up here and it
00:16:30 ►
had sort of snowed not too long ago and it was icy and cold. And I came up over the hill and as I was
00:16:38 ►
starting to go down, all of a sudden the sun came up and it was tens of thousands of rainbows, you know, just the
00:16:50 ►
prisms. It just happened that just as the sun came up and the ice hadn’t melted off the trees yet,
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and it was just, wow. It was just, it was this feeling of like, I feel God a lot but but it doesn’t always like
00:17:07 ►
show off and it was God showing off and it was just this amazing sense of okay
00:17:14 ►
here here I am I if if I die in the next 30 seconds I’m cool that’s that’s fine
00:17:19 ►
this is just astounding this is amazing amazing. So that’s another one. And a third one, because Lex has been trying to get me to do psychedelics again with a fairly hard arm behind the back there.
00:17:47 ►
And I said, you know, I’ll just sort of be walking and I’ll think, I’ll just sort of maybe step on a piece of sand and I’ll think, wow.
00:18:11 ►
You know, you think about the sand and you think about even just our body and you think, OK, know to get to 10 trillion uh takes you back you know before the beginning of the earth so you know it’s like that’s how many cells there are in us it’s just
00:18:16 ►
it’s just an amazing number and every cell has several hundred thousand um um or it has just all sorts of other stuff going on, and there’s
00:18:29 ►
trillions and trillions of atoms in each cell. And so you’re sort of thinking, okay, if there’s
00:18:37 ►
something that’s all-knowing here, and every one of those atoms has all these electrons going
00:18:43 ►
around it that aren’t even in one place, right? So,
00:18:47 ►
you know, when you sort of think about how things are, you’ve got these electrons moving around,
00:18:54 ►
and nothing is as it seems at all. And there’s something that knows where every electron is.
00:19:00 ►
There’s something that knows that it all sort of goes together. And we’re part of that.
00:19:10 ►
And so, you know, you sort of have that, and it’s psychoactive.
00:19:14 ►
You know, it’s a place where all of a sudden your brain can hit that.
00:19:20 ►
It’s like, wow, we’re so, I am so honored and blessed to just be a little chunk of that and a little bit of walking dirt.
00:19:27 ►
So anyway, I said that to Lex,
00:19:29 ►
and he said, yeah, you probably don’t need to psych to Lex again.
00:19:33 ►
But who knows?
00:19:34 ►
So anyway, that’s my story. See ya.
00:19:41 ►
To see the universe in a grain of sand, Blake said.
00:19:46 ►
Yeah, thank you.
00:19:48 ►
I especially love the middle story.
00:19:49 ►
He posted the photo of that, of coming over the hill that day, and it was beautiful.
00:19:53 ►
And I think it’s one of the most important things that Symposia and myself try to get across is
00:19:58 ►
these drugs are a really great way to access these states that are available to anyone at any time through hard work.
00:20:06 ►
That’s the thing. All of these drugs are enabling stuff that’s already there in your brain. You know,
00:20:10 ►
there’s lots of stories of yogis in India being given acid and being like, oh yeah, of course,
00:20:16 ►
I get this. And it’s one of the best parts. It is how beautiful and complicated our brains is.
00:20:22 ►
I just think that it’s really helpful because for someone like myself,
00:20:26 ►
I never would have been anything
00:20:28 ►
but a very materialistic, rationalistic scientist
00:20:31 ►
if I didn’t have magic mushrooms.
00:20:32 ►
That was the easy way to get a helicopter
00:20:35 ►
to go to the top of the mountaintop,
00:20:37 ►
but then you have to do the hard work
00:20:39 ►
to figure out how to walk up there,
00:20:41 ►
and that’s part of what enabled yoga
00:20:42 ►
and Buddhist practice in this country. And it’s part of what enabled yoga and Buddhist practice in this
00:20:45 ►
country. And it’s one of the most important points. These drugs are just a really excellent
00:20:50 ►
tool out of the many tools we have. We’re trying to figure out a little bit of this
00:20:54 ►
complicated grain scheme. Okay, and now if we can cover up the camera for this one. We
00:21:01 ►
have a local friend who’s going to be presenting, and that’s all we’ll say about that.
00:21:07 ►
Please give a round of applause for our friend. I’m excited to be the local friend.
00:21:19 ►
There was a time before my present self, which is just extreme responsibility, where I was a little less
00:21:25 ►
responsible. And it’s kind of fun to juxtapose that to now. So it started pretty innocently
00:21:32 ►
where there was a nuclear power plant in our hometown and we would go for, when I was in
00:21:37 ►
high school, we’d get pizza and go sit at the foot of it at the cooling tower for lunch
00:21:41 ►
because back then there wasn’t any security. And then it escalated to taking a video camera and climbing the staircase to the top of the nuclear power plant
00:21:50 ►
where I had the thrill of getting on tape surrounded by the police.
00:21:55 ►
And they actually, after four hours of interrogation, walked away with the tape and nothing went wrong.
00:22:00 ►
And so that led to the next event, which is the one that I remember fondly
00:22:06 ►
when I think back to LSD which was I was being the responsible one at the time because I wasn’t on it
00:22:12 ►
I was just dressed completely in drag with my six friends who were dressed in drag they were all
00:22:17 ►
tripping in the minivan as we went to the nuclear power plant in the middle of the night we’re doing
00:22:21 ►
donuts in the parking lot at which time the the guards came, and I was now on a first-name basis with them, and
00:22:28 ►
so I just never, I remember finally, like, this, all my friends kind of rolling out of
00:22:33 ►
the van, dressed completely in drag, completely, you know, trying to process what’s going on,
00:22:37 ►
and the security guards just saying, okay, Adam, can you please just leave us alone,
00:22:41 ►
and we walked away. What’s interesting about that,
00:22:46 ►
I think if you juxtapose that to today’s society, I don’t think you could do that anymore. You know,
00:22:50 ►
it’s like that was, we were just having fun and they knew we were having fun and we got away with
00:22:55 ►
it. So that’s, that’s my story. Thank you.
00:23:07 ►
Good evening.
00:23:14 ►
I was helping Lex and Brett and Brian and Charles and Gonzo and all the people who are organizing this event
00:23:16 ►
over the last couple months to vision this out and put it together.
00:23:21 ►
And I knew that one of the evenings was going to be psychedelic storytelling and i’d
00:23:26 ►
been to one of the events where they’d done this before in massachusetts in the spring in amherst
00:23:30 ►
and uh i was like thinking thinking trying to rack my brain like i must have some story that i could
00:23:37 ►
bring uh that i feel like is worth anything and then i found myself telling one to a friend like
00:23:44 ►
at dinner like two days ago and i was like damn all right this is actually i think an interesting story for
00:23:50 ►
this event and for this time and place um a lot of the stuff we’ll be discussing tomorrow in the
00:23:57 ►
event uh here that’s more talks and presentations about the past, present, and potentially future research around psychedelics
00:24:07 ►
and psilocybin specifically. A lot of these conversations right now are really inside of the,
00:24:15 ►
or take place in front of the backdrop of the fact that these substances are by and large
00:24:20 ►
illegal in the world and that the war on drugs is in its, you know, 40th, 45th year or something,
00:24:27 ►
and, like, kind of still kicking,
00:24:29 ►
although maybe changing,
00:24:32 ►
but still very, very present in these conversations.
00:24:35 ►
So this story kind of is interesting to me
00:24:39 ►
in the context that it brings to that context.
00:24:45 ►
It’s actually a story that my dad should tell
00:24:47 ►
because it happened to him.
00:24:50 ►
I’ve heard him tell it enough times
00:24:51 ►
that I feel like I’m just going to give it a go
00:24:54 ►
and there’ll be stuff lost in translation
00:24:55 ►
and stuff that I probably made up,
00:24:57 ►
but that’s all in the game of storytelling, I guess.
00:25:04 ►
So I think the date is somewhere around the 70s,
00:25:07 ►
somewhere in the early 70s.
00:25:09 ►
So maybe LSD must have just been illegal
00:25:12 ►
for a few years at that point.
00:25:17 ►
My dad was a priest,
00:25:20 ►
an Episcopalian priest or Anglican
00:25:22 ►
in Philadelphia at the time,
00:25:26 ►
working at Penn University.
00:25:29 ►
And he had a woman who he was very close friends with,
00:25:36 ►
who was his secretary at the office there,
00:25:39 ►
who was getting married and had asked my father
00:25:43 ►
to do the marriage ceremony, a very normal affair
00:25:46 ►
for a priest to be doing. So everything’s, you know, my dad takes this, took this stuff seriously
00:25:54 ►
and really always enjoyed like meeting the couples he was going to marry like several times before
00:26:01 ►
doing the actual ceremony and getting to know them a bit and having
00:26:05 ►
conversations about what they wanted the ceremony to be like and maybe even seeing if they want
00:26:10 ►
to write their own vows or things like that and really kind of making the ceremony something
00:26:14 ►
that’s specific to them instead of just some cookie cutter, boiler plate, religious thing
00:26:21 ►
to read through.
00:26:24 ►
So this was going well.
00:26:25 ►
He met the groom-to-be,
00:26:29 ►
who was a big guy from South Philadelphia.
00:26:33 ►
Anyone who knows Philadelphia knows South Philadelphia
00:26:35 ►
is kind of like one of the rough-and-tumble parts of town.
00:26:37 ►
A lot of Italians, a lot of organized crime.
00:26:40 ►
And this guy was named, like, Vinnie or Tony
00:26:43 ►
or something like this.
00:26:47 ►
That’s something I don’t remember in the story, but it’s somewhat irrelevant.
00:26:50 ►
It’s one of those names that screams mob, you know.
00:26:54 ►
And my dad really trusts and knows this woman very well,
00:26:59 ►
so he’s like, you know, going through this whole process and very, you know,
00:27:04 ►
he’s got his heart in it and
00:27:05 ►
so do these two people um so the wedding comes everything goes great like my dad says it was
00:27:12 ►
like a crazy experience there are tons of people like in suits with gold chains and like their
00:27:16 ►
shirts unbuttoned to uh to two buttons you know um a big big south philadelphia wedding um it was
00:27:24 ►
something totally outside of my dad’s normal life and scene,
00:27:27 ►
but such is the life of someone doing marriages
00:27:32 ►
for people who ever come to you, right?
00:27:34 ►
And somewhere in the middle of this whole process,
00:27:37 ►
it turns out that Tony or Vinny, this guy,
00:27:39 ►
is not in fact part of the mob,
00:27:41 ►
although he does seem to quite associate with it,
00:27:43 ►
but he’s in fact an undercover narc for the Philadelphia police force. I don’t remember if he knew that before
00:27:55 ►
the wedding or not. It doesn’t really matter. I would like to know. So this is an interesting
00:28:02 ►
part of the story. And the wedding goes well. and it’s like it’s weeks later, nothing to report.
00:28:08 ►
And my dad gets a phone call from this guy.
00:28:10 ►
And he says, Ralph, thank you so much.
00:28:14 ►
You know, the ceremony, everything, it meant a lot to us.
00:28:16 ►
It went wonderfully.
00:28:18 ►
I want to take you out to lunch and just catch up because I enjoyed speaking to you so much.
00:28:22 ►
And let’s do it again.
00:28:24 ►
My dad was like, great.
00:28:24 ►
That sounds great. Let’s do that. So My dad was like, great. That sounds great.
00:28:25 ►
Let’s do that.
00:28:26 ►
So they go out to lunch sometime.
00:28:28 ►
They have a nice conversation.
00:28:29 ►
They get back in each other’s loops.
00:28:33 ►
And he says, Ralph, I want to give you a gift.
00:28:38 ►
This has meant so much to me.
00:28:39 ►
I want to give you a gift for what you’ve done for us.
00:28:41 ►
And my dad’s saying, well, I mean, you already paid me.
00:28:43 ►
There’s no need, but, you know, thank you.
00:28:48 ►
And he says, Ralph, have you ever done LSD?
00:28:54 ►
And my dad’s, you know, talking to a policeman.
00:28:59 ►
And it’s 1970-something, you know.
00:29:01 ►
And my dad had never done LSD.
00:29:04 ►
My dad’s a bit too old to be a hippie quite.
00:29:07 ►
He was born in 1936.
00:29:08 ►
So he was kind of like more of the beach generation perhaps and was around a lot of the countercultural stuff in the 60s.
00:29:14 ►
But he wasn’t like a he wasn’t like in his early 20s or something.
00:29:17 ►
He was like in his mid 30s.
00:29:18 ►
So he was like supportive to a lot of the cause and like devoted to the anti-war cause and the civil rights cause and like involved in a lot of the stuff which we associate with the hippie generation and like the
00:29:29 ►
early psychedelic movement of the time but hadn’t really been right in the thick of it himself
00:29:33 ►
so this is uh so the answer is no to the question has he ever done lsd and and uh tony or we’ll say
00:29:40 ►
tony tony says uh i’d love to give you LSD as a gift for this,
00:29:45 ►
and could you have a free Saturday sometime?
00:29:48 ►
My dad, I think it’s so cool that my dad actually, like,
00:29:51 ►
took this seriously and did it,
00:29:53 ►
and took him seriously and said, yeah, you know,
00:29:56 ►
like, next Saturday sounds good, let’s do it.
00:29:58 ►
So he took, my dad cleared his schedule.
00:30:02 ►
He had a wife and kids at the time at home
00:30:04 ►
and a job as a priest.
00:30:10 ►
And cleared his schedule for a day.
00:30:13 ►
Drives out to this guy’s house.
00:30:17 ►
He welcomes my, the guy welcomes my father into a room he has in the basement.
00:30:22 ►
And he says, okay, Ralph, do you like Beethoven?
00:30:30 ►
And my dad loves Beethoven.
00:30:32 ►
He’s a huge Beethoven fan,
00:30:33 ►
huge classical music fan in general,
00:30:35 ►
so this is an easy answer again.
00:30:38 ►
Yeah, I love Beethoven.
00:30:39 ►
And he says, great, okay.
00:30:41 ►
So he gives my dad what my dad describes as,
00:30:48 ►
he remembers it looking like, I think it was two pills,
00:30:52 ►
like pressed pills, maybe like sugar pills kind of thing,
00:30:55 ►
which I imagine must have been, I’m totally theorizing here,
00:31:00 ►
but I imagine it must have been seized drugs.
00:31:03 ►
Because this guy’s a cop.
00:31:06 ►
He’s not only a cop,
00:31:07 ►
but he was specifically an undercover cop
00:31:09 ►
doing drug busts, researching this.
00:31:13 ►
So these drugs go somewhere when they’re seized,
00:31:16 ►
and somehow Vinny had some.
00:31:22 ►
And so he gives my dad the LSD. He tells my dad to lie down on the floor. He has a carpet
00:31:29 ►
there. And he just starts DJing Beethoven records at my dad all day long while my dad just lies
00:31:38 ►
there and blisses out on the floor for the whole session. And my dad talks about it kind of humbly and modestly.
00:31:48 ►
He says, like, oh, the music was, you know,
00:31:50 ►
it got right inside my body and the colors of the room
00:31:55 ►
and the colors of the strings and all of the sounds
00:32:00 ►
and timbres of the orchestrations just mixed behind my eyelids.
00:32:05 ►
And, you know, he had a wonderful experience.
00:32:10 ►
And, you know, I guess 10 or 8 to 12 hours later,
00:32:16 ►
shook Vinny’s hand and got up and drove back home to his life.
00:32:21 ►
And he’s never done psychedelics since then,
00:32:24 ►
but it really really
00:32:26 ►
has left his mind completely open and receptive to the fact that these are uh interesting and
00:32:33 ►
like safe experiences right um someone who in other ways wasn’t particularly caught up in the
00:32:42 ►
in the center of the psychedelic uh whirlwind of the of the 60s and 70s, as I mentioned,
00:32:48 ►
which I think is interesting.
00:32:53 ►
That’s about it for the story.
00:32:54 ►
The reason that I think it’s cool to tell in 2015 here is, like, this guy who is like a narc,
00:33:02 ►
who we demonize these people like crazy all the time inside of the psychedelics conversations.
00:33:09 ►
You know, the fact that the D.A. is going after psychedelics producers and blah, blah, blah.
00:33:15 ►
Like this guy, first of all, not only did he have the presence of mind to understand that there was something like not just like illegal and bad about the drugs that he was
00:33:27 ►
maybe like tracking down and seizing um but he also was like seemingly a totally well-trained
00:33:34 ►
like psychedelic session leader or like therapist even right because like seriously like he did
00:33:41 ►
exactly what they do at the Johns Hopkins like. He led my dad through more or less textbook how all the clinical trials are being led these days inside of controlled academic or medical situations. to the priest who married him because he thinks it would be a meaningful gift
00:34:06 ►
for him having just blessed his relationship
00:34:08 ►
that he’s going to be following through the rest of his life.
00:34:12 ►
It trips me out in a bunch of different ways,
00:34:15 ►
and I think it’s really humanizing and interesting
00:34:17 ►
to all the different sides of the stories
00:34:21 ►
that we’re telling and thinking about
00:34:23 ►
and interacting with these days,
00:34:25 ►
to remember that all the different people who are involved in these,
00:34:28 ►
whether or not they’ve had direct experiences with the substances themselves,
00:34:32 ►
probably have, if they have, they probably do have some sort of personal, like,
00:34:38 ►
understanding of what’s going on that’s not just straight dogmatic,
00:34:42 ►
not just straight legalistic, not just straight, you know,
00:34:48 ►
and also from the other side, not just like directly kind of like anti any of those things
00:34:55 ►
for us on like the pro psychedelic side, if you want to say it that way. So yeah, wherever this
00:35:02 ►
guy is right now, I thank him like crazy for having done this. And I
00:35:06 ►
imagine if he did it with my father, my father wasn’t the only one who he did this to. So yeah,
00:35:14 ►
there you go. I was asked by one of the members to come and share my ayahuasca experience.
00:35:30 ►
So I went to Peru two years ago, and the girl I was dating at the time was already down there,
00:35:31 ►
so I went and met up with her.
00:35:34 ►
And she had done this several times before, and I’d never done it.
00:35:37 ►
And I was pretty nervous about it.
00:35:44 ►
And I had smoked DMT in the past and kind of thought maybe it’ll be something like that. And I had also seen DMT, The Spirit Molecule.
00:35:47 ►
So going into it the first night, I was kind of expecting…
00:35:52 ►
I had certain expectations based on that movie that I saw.
00:35:55 ►
And I thought I was going to get like a laser light show, you know.
00:35:58 ►
And I’ve done several other psychedelics before.
00:36:02 ►
And so I kind of was expecting to get the same experience.
00:36:05 ►
several other psychedelics before. And so I kind of was expecting to get the same experience. But the day before we drank ayahuasca, I drank San Pedro and tripped on mescaline for 16 hours.
00:36:16 ►
So all my neurotransmitters were shot and I had gotten no sleep.
00:36:22 ►
But I was still willing to go through with it anyway.
00:36:31 ►
And I was laying in bed for about an hour after I drank the ayahuasca,
00:36:33 ►
and I did it without a shaman.
00:36:36 ►
And so the whole time I was just kind of repeating a mantra in my head and trying to get to the root cause of my insecurities.
00:36:42 ►
And so I kept posing this question, you know,
00:36:44 ►
what is it that I’m most insecure about?
00:36:46 ►
What is it that’s holding me back the most from being who I am?
00:36:51 ►
After about an hour, hour and a half into it,
00:36:53 ►
realizing that I wasn’t going to get this laser light show,
00:36:57 ►
I asked my girlfriend, what am I supposed to experience?
00:37:00 ►
And she asked me what I had been seeing and hearing
00:37:03 ►
or what my experience was. And I started talking about all these images that I had been seeing and hearing or what my experience was.
00:37:05 ►
And I started talking about all these images that I had of my childhood
00:37:09 ►
in this house that I lived in when my parents got divorced.
00:37:13 ►
And so the first thing I saw was our dining room table and my bedroom in that house.
00:37:21 ►
And I couldn’t really understand why I was being shown this.
00:37:23 ►
And the next image that I was shown was my parents arguing at our dinner table and they had asked me to
00:37:31 ►
take my food and eat in my room, which is something they had never ever done before.
00:37:34 ►
And, you know, again, I wasn’t sure why I was being shown this. And it was like I was
00:37:40 ►
jumping from scene to scene throughout my life in like a several year span. And it didn’t hit me at first why I was seeing all these things.
00:37:48 ►
But the next few scenes I saw were both of my parents sitting on my bed, just tucking me in at night.
00:37:55 ►
And I asked them, you know, are you going to get divorced?
00:37:58 ►
And they told me no.
00:38:00 ►
And I made them promise me.
00:38:02 ►
And they did.
00:38:03 ►
And then I realized that they ended up getting divorced.
00:38:09 ►
And so I was taken to a few other scenes in my childhood and into my adolescence where I saw myself just being very angry.
00:38:18 ►
And I was very mean to my brother and very controlling.
00:38:21 ►
And I would use aggression and sometimes violence to get my way.
00:38:24 ►
and very controlling, and I would use aggression and sometimes violence to get my way.
00:38:32 ►
And going through part of this and reliving it and experiencing the emotion again made me emotional.
00:38:39 ►
And I began to see that I was holding a grudge against both my parents for breaking their promise not to get divorced.
00:38:43 ►
And I had held onto that grudge for 15 years and never, ever realized it.
00:38:49 ►
And because of it, what my mom was doing to raise us,
00:38:54 ►
what my dad was doing to raise us was never good enough for me.
00:38:57 ►
And I always felt like they were doing something wrong.
00:39:01 ►
And this experience allowed me to see that, you know,
00:39:05 ►
they’re people too, they fuck up,
00:39:07 ►
and they’re really just trying their best, you know,
00:39:10 ►
as parents to raise my brother and I.
00:39:13 ►
And so that was very good to see that in a different way
00:39:20 ►
and let that go.
00:39:22 ►
Some other things that came up were that I used aggression a lot to get my way
00:39:27 ►
and that I used this to control situations
00:39:29 ►
because I felt such an absolute loss of control from them getting divorced.
00:39:35 ►
And since then, until a few years ago,
00:39:39 ►
when things wouldn’t go my way,
00:39:43 ►
I would, even in in relationships start causing problems because
00:39:47 ►
i needed to exert control to make sure that things would go my way so
00:39:53 ►
we wouldn’t split up or it was pretty fucked up you know like
00:39:57 ►
yeah it was pretty messed up how I would behave in relationships.
00:40:05 ►
And a few other things I saw about my parents’ relationships was I was also shown a moment when I asked my dad about his marriage with my mom.
00:40:17 ►
And he told me he remembers standing at the altar thinking in his head, well, if this doesn’t work out, I could just get divorced.
00:40:23 ►
thinking in his head, well, if this doesn’t work out, I could just get divorced.
00:40:31 ►
And I felt so much anger when I saw that moment again.
00:40:36 ►
I just thought, how the fuck could you go through that and think that?
00:40:42 ►
And it really just drove me to never want to be in a situation where I would think,
00:40:44 ►
well, I can always back out later, you know. I wanted to be in something where I could just give it my all and really not feel like
00:40:50 ►
if I didn’t want to be here, I could just leave and do something else.
00:41:01 ►
And that was just really challenging to do.
00:41:04 ►
And when I came back from Peru, I told both my parents about this,
00:41:07 ►
and they were just like, their jaw dropped.
00:41:10 ►
They didn’t really have much to say.
00:41:12 ►
They were happy that I went and had this experience,
00:41:15 ►
but they’ve, my mom was never big on drugs.
00:41:19 ►
My dad used to be a hippie and do stuff all the time,
00:41:21 ►
so he was a little more open-minded about it,
00:41:23 ►
He used to be a hippie and do stuff all the time, so he was a little more open-minded about it. But once they realized how this trip impacted me and changed my views and feelings about them and relationships,
00:41:34 ►
I think they were a little more open to it.
00:41:39 ►
The experience itself was a little uncomfortable, especially coming up on it.
00:41:47 ►
Felt like my whole body was vibrating, like every cell in my body was vibrating.
00:41:51 ►
And it was so uncomfortable.
00:41:53 ►
And my eyes were closed.
00:41:54 ►
And at times I forgot that I had a body.
00:41:57 ►
And I almost panicked a few times and puked because I was just like scared shitless.
00:42:03 ►
And all I had was my breath.
00:42:04 ►
And so I would just breathe slowly and deeply and just think, well, at least I have this, you know, whatever I am.
00:42:11 ►
You know, I have my breath and I know that I exist.
00:42:15 ►
And that was what I got most out of it.
00:42:19 ►
And I felt so connected to nature and the universe.
00:42:23 ►
And it was very spiritually enlightening.
00:42:25 ►
And there were times where I felt like I could see the spiritual realm around me,
00:42:32 ►
and I could see that part of myself that isn’t here physically.
00:42:37 ►
And it was beautiful.
00:42:43 ►
What my spirit looked like, and this is so strange, it just looked like this big
00:42:49 ►
pill-shaped filing cabinet, but in each of all these little cabinets, it was like a little TV
00:42:56 ►
screen, and it had all these different memories and moments and feelings, and I remember coming
00:43:02 ►
down from the trip thinking it looks a lot like the Kanye West graduation album cover,
00:43:07 ►
that cartoony, really bizarre, cool-looking scenery.
00:43:12 ►
And it was awesome.
00:43:15 ►
It was probably one of the scariest
00:43:16 ►
but most beautiful experiences I’ve ever had.
00:43:19 ►
And I’d definitely love to do it again.
00:43:21 ►
Yeah, all right.
00:43:22 ►
Nice.
00:43:23 ►
Man.
00:43:33 ►
When I was first born, I had a stroke.
00:43:41 ►
And it caused damage in my brain that caused other issues that were more mental than everything.
00:43:47 ►
And I was put on a lot of medication.
00:43:52 ►
I mean, a lot of medication.
00:43:54 ►
At 11 years old, I was taking 1,000 milligrams of Depakote
00:43:59 ►
with G-Don in there, Adderall, extender release, Seroquil.
00:44:07 ►
And it almost killed me at one point.
00:44:13 ►
I went, and I wasn’t feeling well because with my Depakote and how much I was on,
00:44:18 ►
I had to get my blood tested every month to make sure my levels were okay.
00:44:28 ►
About a week after I got tested, I wasn’t feeling well at school and I went to the nurse next thing I remember is I’m in a hospital I was basically overdosing on Depakote the medication that was
00:44:36 ►
supposed to help me but all all those medications ever did for me was just mute me.
00:44:52 ►
Taking all those medications every single day and constantly being switched and all they ever did was mute me.
00:44:54 ►
I didn’t know who I was growing up.
00:44:57 ►
I didn’t know anything about myself. I didn’t know how to love myself because I didn’t know who I was.
00:45:02 ►
I got so tired of it.
00:45:10 ►
know who I was. I got so tired of it. So tired of just constantly not feeling anything at all, even just a depression. And I just stopped taking my medications. And with that came
00:45:19 ►
chaos, of course. Around that time is when I first tried mushrooms. I am not going to lie, I
00:45:30 ►
didn’t even think, I saw clarity.
00:45:48 ►
For the first time, taking those mushrooms gave me something that no other medication had done before.
00:45:57 ►
And I have been on so many.
00:46:00 ►
So many.
00:46:00 ►
And it was so powerful.
00:46:03 ►
Being able to have the clarity and knowing what I was thinking.
00:46:07 ►
Knowing exactly what I was feeling.
00:46:08 ►
Being able to differentiate between everything that was going on inside my head.
00:46:15 ►
It was beautiful.
00:46:18 ►
And from then on, every time I took them, I concentrated on myself.
00:46:25 ►
I really did. I did a lot of thinking.
00:46:27 ►
I did a lot of searching.
00:46:30 ►
And I finally found myself.
00:46:33 ►
And I really liked myself.
00:46:35 ►
Because I was muted for so long.
00:46:38 ►
I was never sober as a child.
00:46:41 ►
I was on all this medication that did nothing but mute me and didn’t even
00:46:47 ►
help my problem. And I can tell you with mushrooms, it’s not something I have to take every single day
00:46:54 ►
because with every time I take it, even in the smallest dosage, I learn something from it. I know
00:47:01 ►
I figure something out about myself and I can take that. It doesn’t just mute
00:47:08 ►
you. It helps you figure it out. It helps you solve what’s going on and what’s wrong. It actually
00:47:15 ►
fixes the problem. And if anyone has ever gone through something where they feel like your head is a constant mess and you can’t
00:47:27 ►
just even take a second to figure out what’s going on between anything that’s
00:47:32 ►
mushrooms really help and it’s not crazy to think that just because it’s not normalized
00:47:40 ►
because i know for a long time i felt what if I’m just crazy because I’m on
00:47:47 ►
it’s drugs you and the more that I thought about it was like how is this crazy this is what I’m
00:47:55 ►
actually feeling this is true this is real it doesn’t matter what the propaganda says about these drugs, about mushrooms,
00:48:07 ►
because when you take them and you have that experience, you know that it’s real.
00:48:14 ►
You know that it helps.
00:48:19 ►
And that’s my story. Thank you.
00:48:23 ►
Thank you so much.